Residents of Portland, Oregon, recently attended a forum on the question of whether the city should rejoin the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. The city withdrew its task force membership five years ago after the Justice Department turned down a city request for oversight over the JTTF.

The would-be Christmas tree bomber, Mohamed Osman Mohamud.

The decision followed revelations in 2002 that the FBI and the Portland Police kept thousands of “red squad” style police files on political activists. Since 1981, Oregon law has barred police surveillance of political groups in the absence of criminal activity.

“Both the FBI and the Portland Police Bureau have a 70-year history of carrying out surveillance on thousands of innocent individuals and organizations because of their political, religious or social activities – or because of their race or national origin – rather than because there was evidence of criminal activity,” PortlandInsight reported prior to the forum.

In November, Portland was in the news when Mohamed Osman Mohamud was arrested for allegedly plotting to blow up a Christmas tree in Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square. It soon was revealed that the FBI had provided a fake bomb, van, and cell phone (to be used as a detonator) in the incident.

Stephen Sady, assistant federal public defender, said the arrest of the 19-year-old native of Somalia “was obviously timed for maximum impact and maximum publicity.” Sady said the FBI had groomed the defendant and there was “potential for entrapment.”

It can now be said it was also used to stampede Portland into accepting the presence of the FBI and its Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The FBI is notorious for recruiting clueless patsies in bogus terrorism cases. Over the last few years, dozens of such cases have provided the government with a diet of propaganda fodder in the fake war on manufactured terror.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

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In December, the FBI set-up Antonio Martinez, a recent Muslim convert, by providing him with a fake car bomb. In September, America’s preeminent political police force entrapped Sami Samir Hassoun in a contrived bomb plot in the Wrigleyville area of Chicago. Once again, the FBI provided a fake bomb. In October, four men were convicted in a plot to blow up synagogues in New York. The hapless victims cooperated with an informer working for the FBI who posed as a terrorist and supplied the men with inert bombs and Stinger missile tubes. In November, the FBI entrapped Farooque Ahmed in a bomb plot invented by the FBI who sent out informers posing as al-Qaeda members.

There are numerous such cases going back decades. The most famous case involves the FBI plot to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. The FBI allowed a bomb plot to go forward and the explosion killed six people and injured more than a thousand.

We Are Change Portland mentioned the first World Trade Center bombing during the forum with city officials and the FBI (see video below).

An op-ed published in The Oregonian last week argues in favor of a resumption of FBI JTTF activities in Portland. The obviously staged Christmas tree terror plot was mentioned: “The averted attack during Portland’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony has touched off a debate about the city’s decision, six years ago, to withdraw from the task force. That withdrawal was, clearly, unwise.”

The FBI orchestrated event was cooked up not only as yet another sideshow in the never-ending war against manufactured terror, but also as a stunt to frighten the people of Portland into accepting the presence of the FBI.

If the FBI is allowed back into Portland, the city’s residents can expect the agency – acting as America’s political police force – to resume its effort to attack the establishment’s political enemies.

The FBI does not exist to combat kidnappers and bank robbers, as advertised. It exists to neutralize and destroy all political opposition, as its former director, J. Edgar Hoover, so famously said when COINTELPRO was rolled out fifty years ago.